In a recent interview, AMD's next generation CPU architecture gets a name and a socket

Digitimes has a follow up to its interview with AMD's Henri Richard. We covered the first interview here yesterday. Digitimes tried to squeeze a few more details out of Richard about the upcoming K8L platform architecture. In the first interview, Richard would not comment on K8L.

That's not to say we're going to present K8L at Computex – don't get me wrong – but I think that that would be a good time to start to disclose more about the future because one of the strong attributes of our roadmap, both in 2006 and 2007, is socket compatibility. The nice thing we're going to do is to deliver to customers. Whatever improvements K8L will provide, they will be applicable to some of the sockets we will be introducing. Therefore, there's a certain logic, to my mind, in disclosing more at that time.

In the first interview, Richard referred to the new architecture as "8KL" instead, but Digitimes reporters did not get back to us about this idiosyncrasy. The three sockets AMD has on the roadmap are the 1207 pin LGA Socket F for servers, Socket AM2 for the desktop and Socket S1 for mobile devices. All three are expected to have working samples on June 6th, 2006 according to AMD's most recent roadmap.

In response to the approach AMD will take with K8L, Richard previously claimed that future AMD micro-architectures are strictly evolutionary and not revolutionary. In yesterday's interview, he also claimed that AMD will arrive at better performance by improving clock speeds and increasing cache sizes, but that future core technologies will have increased integer and floating-point performance. Seeing as K8L is the only technology on the AMD roadmap for the next year or so after AM2, we can only speculate as to what Richard means by that statement.

Update 03/15/2006: Chris Hall from Digitimes has confirmed with us that the "8KL" reference was a misquote and that Richard was really referring to K8L.

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I'm not sure I really understand this stance by AMD. If we accept for the moment that Intel's Conroe is 10-20% faster than the current AMD processors, what good is it going to be to up the speed or throw more cache at it?

It seems pretty clear that the on-die memory controller negates any significant increase in performance.

Also, wouldn't you thing AMD would be the one to realize that you can't keep pushing up the clock speeds to compensate for an inferior processor architecture? After all, Intel tried that with Net Burst/P4, and all they got was lots of heat and an uninterupted view of the leader's backside.

Do you realize how much more cache conroe has than the amdx2? That is a huge deal and can probably be directly credited with 5-10% of conroes performance advantage. If AMD ups there cache and pushes ~3.4 ghz or so, then things will probably get very interesting again.

At least interesting in the respect that the market will have choices, instead of there being one clear winner like the AMD64 vs the Prescott P4.

Where did you get that information? I have read quotes of Intel officials stating that all Conroe processors will have 4MB of cache. I'm not sure how much cache was in the Conroe processor that was benchmarked, but I would be surprised if Intel didn't try to put its best foot forward by using a 4MB version.

Cache has a huge impact on performance, as anyone who has taken a class on computer architecture can attest. If the benchmarked Conroe did indeed have a 4MB cache, then I think it's safe to say that a large chunk of its performance improvement can be attributed to that. If AMD manages to work a larger cache into its processors, they could close the performance gap.

- Overclock the FX60 just before it bursts into flames (like the AMD K5 did... or does)

Well, it was an average OC on a poorly OCing chip. AMD is probably going to have to come out with a new revision before they can bump up the clock speed too much, but its not like that was the highest OC ever done.

- Use a Celeron version of Conroe clocked for the entry level

No, this was not the cheapo version of Conroe. It would be about like a 3.6GHz Prescott right now. Fast, but there are a few steps above, especially the EE chips.

- Turn off the Conroe's cache

What? You can't turn off cache - or at least not easily outside of the factory. This chip had the full 4MB L2 cache, while cheaper versions (not benchmarked yet) will only have 2MB.

Well, it certainly isn't impossible if the hardware support is there. The Pentium M will turn off portions of its cache on-the-fly to save power. But I fail to see why anyone would think that Intel would completely disable their cache on a chip they are benchmarking. And the original post made it sound like they went into Windows Control Panel and selected "Turn off cache" or something to that affect - maybe I just read it wrong.

quote: Another thing is that AMD has yet to move to a .65 micron process, where Intel already has and is basing Conroe on that. .65 micron should give the Athlon64 / Opteron quite a bit more headroom

AMD is producing 65nm for sale, just not at volume production level. They announced last week that 65nm volume production starts in Aug..
The word is that AMD has already sold all of it's production for Q1, Q2, and part of Q3...I expect that the equipment changeover is already beginning (at least at 1 of the 2 Fabs that will be producing 65nm).

Not entirely true. L2 cache is much faster than main memory and if applications can use 4 megs of local cache, then so much the better.

Don't forget you have to add the latency of the level 1 cache, the level 2 cache, and the latency of main memory to get the total latency of the ram (level 3 in the hiearchy in this case). Have a larger L2 cache will keep more memory requests from having to transverse this far.

Also, the conroe in question did indeed have 4 megs of L2 cache. The latency is unknown at this time, I believe. AMD could also enhance the speed of their L2 cache by increasing the number of sets and therefore decreasing the set size. My guess is if they do go with a larger cache, however, they will keep it the same latency as the current one. Making it faster is expensive, just check out the prescott 1 meg to 2 meg cache increase to see this and why the speed is also important.

You forget that the memory crossbar (amd) allows the CPU's to communicate with eachother at cpu speeds, whereas the shared cache (intel), although addressable by both chips, is controlled by cpu instructions which are communicated over the FSB. This significantly improves intel core-to-core data transfer speeds (as the cache-stored data won't go over the FSB) but those chip-to-ship instructions are still relatively slowed.

Real-world, you see that intel is able to match AMD's performance with ever-increasing cache sizes, but that increases die size, decreasing yeild, and increasing price. I'd hoped that AMD had a magic bullet up their sleeve that would allow them to bypass this path, and they've held out quite a while. Hopefully the move to 65nm will offset any extra costs and provide overall benefit to the consumer.

Well Conroe being on 65nm has a die size of ~ 145mm2 somewhere around this range, so basically about on level with the 90nm Manchester Athlon64x2 Core, also keep in mind Intel has better cache densities then AMD for the most part and hence was able to put on quite a bit of cache on their processor.

On the other hand the move to Socket AM2 processor has increased the die to 220mm2 for the 2x1MB parts the Windsor core.

Intel is selling this CPU for 316US and higher though so I think they will make quite a bit on this core, while they have a ~ 11xmm2 Allendale 2MB cache core for the 241US and 209US price points.

If AMD just shrinks the Windsor core to 65nm the die size will reduce to 132mm2, which is a tad smaller then Conroe but larger then Allendale.

Simple AMD and Intel both talk about how great their future products and processes are. In AMD's case I heave heard something about 40% better transistor performance compared to a generic 65nm process and that Z-RAM tech about 5 times better cache desnity, without a shred of evidence to back this up jsut their word.

Conroe is a different story however, that as we know is a good product without a doubt.

As always just because they have access to this doesn't mean it will be implemented that quickly, if and when AMD improves their cache densities in an actual product and not just hype some tech that they had acquired is when I will believe they can increase their cache densities.

For the moment their cache density will remain inferior at least until they move to the 65nm process. Though cache desnity has already been improved on the Windsor core Athlon64x2.

first off until Conroe actually exists in purchasable hardware...its vaporware that can easily end up being pushed back in development.

Currently AMD is still the boss, the big dog in performance and efficiency, its what you and I can get our paws on, right now. If AMD feels nothing more than a MB or two of extra cache and 4 or 5 hundred more MHZ of speed is enough to counter anything Intel may have by the end of the year, why should they spend any more money. This may come back to bite them in the ass or not.

They are going to sit back, let the market develop and fine tune their next generation chip, the revolutionary one. I don't think AMD expected to be in this position, Intel shot themselves in the foot with that whole netburst fiasco, having to trash generations of chips just to catch up.